Lyons: By 'Indian' metric, Texas is progressive

Venice High School clings to mascot tradition others have consigned to history

Tom Lyons

On the slim chance school officials decide Venice High is due for a new logo that doesn't use a race of people as a mascot, there's one consequence they need not fear.

Some of the reluctance about scrapping a tradition — students pretending to be Indians and painting themselves in cartoonish generic imitation thereof — may be based on the belief that doing so will brand the school district as a bastion of cultural ultra-sensitivity.

They need not worry. They are way too late for that.

To those who insist dropping the Indians name would make Southwest Florida look like it is run by extreme liberals, my answer is: What, just like Texas?

It's not often I cite the Lone Star state as a social role model. But even Texas is way ahead of Sarasota County when it comes to doing away with inappropriate school names and mascots.

That especially includes those that portray Indians as stereotyped characters in a Wild West show.

One Texas city just a few months ago changed the names of four schools because they were deemed inappropriate.

You may be thinking this district has to be around Austin, a relatively college-town-like city that some liberal residents describe as a nice place to live even though unfortunately surrounded by Texas.

But no, it isn't Austin.

Hamilton Middle School, where the Indians just became the Huskies, and where the profiled face in a feathered-headdress will no longer be the school's logo, is in the Houston area. A new district policy there bans culturally offensive mascots.

New names also are being given to schools there that until now were Rebels, Warriors and Redskins.

That isn't even a new trend in Texas. Houston lagged behind Dallas. According to websites tracking the history of racism in mascots and school names, 10 Dallas public schools dumped their Indian-related names in 1999, after a request from a program manager for American Indian Education.

If they get it in Texas, why not here?

The same has been done at many other schools in many other states. Googling the history is fun, and some accounts include newspaper photos from a school in Pekin, Illinois, where school spirit celebrations included white students in pointed straw hats.

They were called the Chinks, until 1980.

A high school in Akron, Ohio called itself the Orientals, and kept that less flagrant but weird race-based name until 2010.

Some alums must have found it sad to give up all the related and fun traditions, which I can only imagine. But no doubt they had always shown nothing but sensitive appreciation for people from Asia.

Other obviously change-worthy names have gone one by one, as more people caught on that even subtly racist messages were bad for educational institutions. Five universities in the United States used the name Indians. Stanford dropped the name in 1972, and Dartmouth did so in 1974, followed by Sienna, Louisiana-Monroe and, six years ago, Arkansas State.

So be assured that Venice High and the Sarasota County School District are way, way too late to be leaders in this educational matter.

But if they stand by their institutionalized wink at racism and insist Indians remain mascot worthy long after all other races have escaped that iconic status, there is still a shot at being seen as being as clueless as the slow-learning owners of the Washington Redskins.

Tom Lyons can be contacted at tom.lyons@heraldtribune.com or (941) 361-4964